Really cool program for D&D players - Fantasy Grounds

Cafe Society
1

(I got permission from Dex to post this.)

I just learned of a really neat program that provides a virtual tabletop RPG experience. It’s called Fantasy Grounds (www.fantasygrounds.com). I first heard about it yesterday and thought the screenshots looked neat. So my husband and I tried the demo, and I was very, very impressed. It’s easy to use, very customizable, and I think with a little practice, would be a very easy way to play pen&paper D&D online. We both went ahead and bought the full, DM version ($35).

To test adventure creation, I took a small (eight page) PDF from WotC’s free adventures and converted it to a Fantasy Grounds adventure, complete with links, a map and more, easily. You can create chat text (what regular adventures call read-aloud text) and then simply drag that into the chat window when you need to. You can link monsters, NPCs, items, and images to the text and to each other. Actually, I could list features all day long. Needless to say, I was very impressed with nearly every aspect of it.

**Pros:
**
[ul]
[li]No one has to leave the house to game, so it should be easier to schedule games. Our group has the hardest time getting a game together with the entire group, because of kids, jobs, being on-call, just finding time to get out of the house. Plus, you don’t have to clean the house before people come over. :)[/][/li]
[li]People in different states/countries would actually be able to play D&D together.[/][/li]
[li]With Teamspeak or Ventrilo or Roger Wilco, you wouldn’t even need to type much. You’d still want to keep the typing for in-game content and game-related info (Like, “I want to cast magic missile.”) Because it keeps a log of the entire chat if the GM wants. But stuff like, “Can I move here without provoking an AoO?” or “How do I type an action in the chat bar?” could be spoken.[/][/li]
[li]The software handles some of the math, so the players wouldn’t have to.[/][/li]
[li]It’s quite configurable. You can make changes to the XML and modify quite a bit of the content.[/][/li]
[li]Play D&D almost whenever you want. It’s probably not too hard to find a group online to play if you’re just in the mood. The company that makes the product runs a messageboard and has a forum for finding players and campaigns.[/][/li][/ul]

Cons:
[ul]
[li]The price. Every person has to have a copy of either the $35 GM version or the $20 player version.[/][/li]
[li]Bugs and crashes. The demo crashed on my husband when I (as the GM) exited out. And the full version crashed on me once when I exited and once on him when I tried to send him a too-large image. I started and stopped the software probably two dozen times without crashes, though. But power and network outages also mean potential problems. Some people on the company’s boards complain of players getting dropped or having other problems. Don’t know how much of a problem this might be.[/][/li]
[li]The software does have some quirks. Nothing that can’t be worked around, but some things, like Tab not working when it should, can be bothersome. [/][/li]
[li]No Mac version. [/][/li]
[li]You’d probably have problems if anyone in the group used dial-up, especially if you tried to send them images that were too big. [/*][/li][/ul]

As you can tell, I really like this product. I could go on and on about the features in it, because I was constantly finding something new. “I wish it did this.” Oh, but it does. “But what about this?” Well, make this little change to the XML and it’ll do that, too.

2

Giving this the single allowed bump in the hopes of getting some responses or questions.

3

Well, work won’t let me take a peek at the site(or it’s broken, but probably the former) so I can’t say, but if I had time and an on-line game it sounds like it could be fine. I’d much rather game in person.

4

You can’t see the site because the link is coded wrong. Here is a fixed one.

I’ll have to take a look around it, but it looks cool. I haven’t been able to play D&D in a whiel since I am in the middle of nowhere with no way to get a group together. This is just crazy enough to work…

5

Oops, sorry about the link. That’s what I get for making posts at 1:30 in the morning.

I plan to run my husband through that adventure tonight, to get a feel for combat. He’s even going to go into another room, so that we can do it with no verbal communication, to see how it works using only text-based communication. I’ll post back on the good and bad of the system.

WotC has lots of mini-modules in PDF form on their website, for free download. You obviously can’t convert them and put them online, but I don’t think it violates copyright to convert them and use them privately.

We have a friend who moved to New York, so I’m really hoping this works out as a way for our group to game together again.

6

Let us know how it works. I’d certainly be interested in a SDMB group. I just don’t have the time to go interviewing people or groups to find (a) a somewhat mature group* who (b) can work with my schedule.

This is certainly not saying that every SDMB member is mature, self included (at times)

7

My group uses OpenRPG. For all its problems it has the advantage of being free. I have looked into Fantasy Grounds, but for one thing it isn’t robust enough to be used in Science Fiction gaming, and for another thing looks like it would be some amount of work, since I apparently can’t draw maps on the fly. Suppose the players do something crazy? It constrains my improvization. It’s possible that it’s all pretty doable, but unfortunately you and all your friends have to drop a bunch of change to even give it a decent chance

8

My Wednesday group uses Fantasy Grounds with Teamspeak. Our Game Master has his own network, etc., so we go to his office and play. The GM plus myself and one other guy are in the office, two players are in Oklahoma City and one player is in Nebraska. We have many of the problems with drop-out, but it’s not all that annoying, really. The GM has scanned the maps from a large D&D module and we find that it is great for keeping track of what happens from week to week. The on-screen character sheets are very convienent, I never have to worry about forgetting to bring stuff. :slight_smile: Depending on how much time and energy you have, a person can program almost anything into it.

We love it. And I can still knit while I play. :slight_smile:

9

Thanks for your input, TheFaerie! That’s cool to hear from someone who actually uses it. I love how as the GM I can create new characters on the fly and talk as them, or the adventure writer can set the adventure up that way.

(pretend the brackets for the first example indicate read-aloud text and in the second example indicate text the GM drags to the chat bar.)

Traditional

[“Oh, thank you,” she said, tears in her eyes. “Now I’ll be able to marry my beloved.”]

Fantasy Grounds

[/id Princess Julia]
[/m happy Oh, thank you.]
[/em cries as she clasps your hand.]
[Now I’ll be able to marry my beloved.]

How it looks to the player:

Princess Julia (happy): Oh, thank you.
Princess Julia cries as she clasps your hand.
Princess Julia: Now I’ll be able to marry my beloved.

A bit more work for the adventure creator, but more immersive.

10

This is just another clever ruse to get me into a game where I get my ass kicked, isn’t it? :slight_smile:

11

I’ll take a look at it; it might be handy to have a pc off to the side keeping track of character sheets for me.

12

Stupid @#$(@ computer! Had this great post that I lost because I had to reboot.

I’ll have to mention this one to my group. One of our friends is on a Mac, and he also has a group in different states. They get together about once a year for a weekend orgy of gaming.

Our experience last night:

One PC vs. 4 rats. Combat ran smoothly, and I got the hang of things on my end in about 15 minutes. We quickly figured out what to make into hotkeys (for him, his weapon attack and damage, along with his initiative roll). It was easy, quite immersive, and overall did a pretty good job of feeling like a real D&D game.

Annoyance: CRs of less than 1 are listed as 1 on the monster sheets.

Problem: After combat when I was messing with the map, he crashed to desktop. I don’t know if it was messing with the map that did it or something else. That could get old very quickly.

13

Question:

Does the program work with older rules?

I only use a self modified version of the original AD&D rules.
I already have most of my maps as .jpg or .bmp
I don’t use modules.

How well does it take specialized spells?

Is it easy to right up and add a unique magic item?

My gaming group has all been playing since the 70’s and I need to be inventive to present them with stuff and situations they haven’t seen before.

This sounds like a option for reconnecting with friends that have moved across country. I already have a PC hooked up as a second monitor on a PC for the game. I think I might be able to make use of something like this.

14

You can make any changes to the rules you want, but I don’t know how easy it is, since I’ve never tried it. It requires modifying the XML directly, though. There’s no in-software way to do it.

Someone on the company’s boards has already made an AD&D 1st edition ruleset that you can import. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, since I’ve all but forgotten the older rules (and never played 1st edition anyway).

You can drop any images into a campaign’s image folder (though I suggest making them as small in byte size as possible) of the most common image types (like .bmp and .jpg and a few others) and they’re ready to go whenever you need them in that campaign.

15

I used fantasygrounds to reconnect with a good friend of mine who originally played the game with me way back when we bought the Basic Set about, oh call it 22 years ago. We used it since January until I had to drop out of the game about a month or so ago (they’re still using Fantasy Grounds though) to pretty good success. My friend and his wife are in North Carolina, another guy was in a different part of that state, and we had another friend here in PA that plays.

Overall, Fantasy Grounds is a good product. As always, even with paper and pen, the DM has an awful lot of extra work to do. I didn’t run the game so I’m not sure what all he had to do, but it was a lot (and he’s not much of a complainer).

The biggest pro: you get to play D&D.
Second biggest pro: the dice actuall ROLL!!! You don’t just see some number pop up…you grab the dice icon and “roll” it into the chat window. If you wing 'em really hard toward the side of the screen you can actually get them to spin (except for those damn four siders).

Biggest con: it takes a long time to do much of anything. We started out using the voice function on Yahoo Messenger, but the DM decided he wanted everything in the chat window so he’d have a record. The positive side of this is that you really have to think about your role playing since you can’t use voice inflection and body language. So, in my extremely limited experience, you tend to get better RP.